Hey Tim,

It's always nice to get to know more people and their techniques.
I am working as a Lead Animator for Studio Fizbin in Germany. We use Spine with Unity to create animations for our point and click adventure The Inner World 2. After having tried a couple of different techniques (frame by frame spritesheets in Inner World 1) we settled for Spine, because the support and bug fixing is super fast and the list of features is so long (paths and constraints have become very valuable to us).
Nima does indeed look very interesting, but when I tested it some important features were missing (most notably switching attachments).

Is your game the one on Armor Games?

All the best,
Ferdinand

Just want to say that everyone at my company has the crash as well... all Windows. Sooooo back to 3.5.47

Hi everyone,

I have a feature request: Wouldn't it be useful if animations in the tree could be organized in folders/groups?
My main char has about 50-60 animations counting all transitions and emotions and it's getting quite tedious to find the correct animation.
What do you guys think?

All the best,

Nice idea

You could also constraint a bone to a path and then use the position slider to move it along the path.

However, to my knowledge there are no spatial interpolation curves you could display and manipulate. So for all single bone motions there is no way to not get a triangle with 3 keys unless you tie that bone to other bones or constraints.

I noticed that duplicating bones with weighted meshs behave differently when the mesh is contained in a skin placeholder slot. Namely they will still be bound to the original rather than the duplicate.

I recorded a video of both ways:
Spine: Problem duplicating weighted meshs in skin slots - YouTube

Also I realized that undoing the duplicating step will cause a crash - I attached the log.

Is this here part of this bug?
I just updated to 3.5.22. We use skin slots to make our character have shadow on the right or left side, but sometimes the shoulder goes so far in the middle it doesn't have any shadow in both cases. So I switch from the skin placeholder to a no-shadow attachment that is outside of the skin slot. This worked in 3.4, but now the image is invisible. Should this be like this?

:yes: +1 for a soft radius tool

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if I am doing something wrong in my workflow. Our characters usually have mirrored arms and hands on one side. Every now and then we need to add more hand images (on both sides of course). So I go to the original hand slot and add the new images in setup mode, usually I have to reposition them because they were placed with an offset.
What is the proper way of getting these images correctly positioned into the the mirrored hand on the other side? If I copy the new images position values they will appear at the position of the non-flipped version.
If I haven't started animating, I usually just delete the mirrored side and make a copy from the original, flip it and can put everything at once into the right position. But that obviously doesn't work if some animation has already been made.

I would appreciate any hints about this :rofl:

+1 for a proper curve editor

Yeah I was trying to write an expression in After Effects just to see how it would be done in there, but the translation influence on the scale is pretty tricky to define... It would be amazing if Spine came up an intuitive way to set that range.

You have the best UI of all animation programs I have ever seen. So if there is an awesome way to do this, you will find it :yes:

Found another use case for constraining one thing to several things at different rates: I am faking perspective head turns by pulling the facial features to the left, except for the one eye which has a weaker constraint. At the moment I have to manually squash that eye to make the illusion of perspective complete. It would be so neat if the face perspective bone could not only pull the one eye at a weaker rate but also squash it in the process.
Does that make sense? Is there any chance something like this could be implemented to the editor? :angel:

Hooray :party: Thanks! :yes: :sun:

I noticed that for mirrored bones the rotation gesture also mirrors. Usually you drag the mouse up for rotating clockwise and down for counterclockwise, but if you make the x value negative first, this will switch.

It confuses me during animation when the hand of a mirrored arm rotates differently. :bang:
Would it be possible to make mirrored bones rotate like normal bones? I would really appreciate it.

Thank you for your detailed reply. Lots of helpful advice in there (some of which I am actually already using when I properly rig these arms).
I think the style I'm working with is just a pretty extreme case. Something about the arm being so narrow and not wanting sharp edges but round curves seems to be especially tricky.

I just didn't realize that programs could have their own different "flavor" in the way that bones bend meshes even when the geometry and weighting seems almost identical. I feel like nima is much better with very soft and gradually weighted setups (can it be that they somehow slightly rotate edges to compensate for dents?), while Spine can do sharp bends without completely crushing the volume (and the auto weighting is so much better 8) ).

Thanks again!

Good idea +1

Wow that's a lot of vertices. o.O
Thank you for sharing. I actually did do it the proper way for my 8 bone version. This was just an intentionally simplified test, because I know that this works in other 3D software with just 2 bones and very gradual weighting, but not in Spine. So I tried it in Nima and there it works with just two bones - but it doesn't look good in Spine. Sure it works with the path and the chain of many bones but it takes longer to set up for the amount of characters that we have. And for my game we really have to save up on vertices, so I still get some bumps on the resolution level I can afford.
I really appreciate that you took the time to make a screenshot. Maybe I am a bit too conservative with the vertices count :think: